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Saturday, June 1, 2013

Pakistan's movie-makers dig deep to revive film industry

On the fifth take, everything appeared to have come together. The script monitors confirmed that the two actors had got their lines right, the woman in charge of the set was pleased with how the crumbling apartment in a Karachi slum had been dressed, and the camera operator was content with the shot.

But the distant screech of a motorbike from the teeming streets outside wrecked the take (barking mutts, the bane of earlier attempts, had been successfully shooed away by the crew's "dog team").

"OK, again," sighed the director, Jami. "Sound is our biggest problem in Pakistan," he said. That, and a lack of cinema houses to show the work of movie makers, chronic DVD piracy and the near-complete collapse of the country's once vibrant film industry.

Given the problems, it is remarkable that any feature films are being made at all. But a recent spate of ambitious productions has raised hopes that the moribund movie industry may be on the verge of a renaissance.

They are all the work of a small band of enthusiastic film-makers, often cobbling together financing from what they have earned directing television commercials for washing powder and soft drinks.

Link to video: The attempt to rebuild Pakistan's cinema culture

"This is guerrilla film-making," said Shahzad Nawaz, director of a recently released film called Chambaili.

"You have to do everything yourself and you have to invest blood and tears to make it happen."

Compared with India's £2bn Bollywood film industry, the dozen or so films produced in Pakistan in recent years represent a tiny output. But there is hope that it will be the start of something big.

"The industry is re-emerging very fast," said Nadeem Mandviwalla, a leading cinema owner, "but after 30 years of decline there is a lot of catching up to do."

The movie business was crushed, he said, by the rise of pirated videos and DVDs . According to a report published last year by the US government, Pakistan is among the 13 worst countries in the world for intellectual property theft. In addition to pirated DVDs and illegal downloading, cable television companies cheerfully pump stolen movies directly into people's homes.

Pakistan's crumbling infrastructure of classic cinema houses, many of which are now dives showing seedy B-movies, is unfit to compete. One film distributor estimates that there are just 150 cinemas in a country of 180 million people, and 130 of those are "in a shambles".

The already small number of screens was further reduced by mobs who torched cinemas in Karachi and Peshawar last year to protest against a YouTube video said to be blasphemous.

A cinema in Peshawar, Pakistan Photograph: A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images

But big investments in new digital multiplexes have begun luring middle-class youngsters to the cinema for the first time.

All of Pakistan's leading cities now have at least one decent cinema. Even Islamabad, the capital city, which has not had a cinema for more than a decade, will soon get a Mandviwalla multiplex.

In addition to dramatic cuts in entertainment taxes in 2001, the biggest boost to business was the discovery in 2007 of a lucrative loophole that allows cinemas to sidestep a ban on showing movies made in India.

Indian films are hugely popular with Urdu-speaking Pakistanis – whose language is almost the same as Bollywood's Hindi offerings.

But Indian movies, music and even cross-border contact between artists and sportsmen are occasionally squelched when relations between the two feuding neighbours hit a low point. "Importing these films is still illegal under the law, but we get certificates saying this is a British movie, or American if it comes through Disney or Fox," said Rehmat Fazli, a leading film distributor who buys the rights to Indian films via international middlemen.

Indian films, with a smattering of Hollywood blockbusters, dominate the box office at Pakistan's glitzy new multiplexes.

Sceptics say the failure to protect the home market means Pakistani film-makers will never be able to compete. But Fazli and Mandviwalla believe the glut of Indian movies is helping to educate a new generation of filmgoers on the joy of big-screen entertainment, ultimately creating an audience for home-produced films.

"The survival of Pakistani film-making will be determined by Indian films," said Fazli. "The industry depends on cinemas, and people want to come and see Indian films because we share the same language, the same culture."

But film-makers, increasingly located in Karachi rather than Lahore, the traditional home of Pakistan's "Lollywood", still need to work out how to make films, on a fraction of Bollywood's budgets, that can compete in a sea of Indian movies, with their signature mix of spectacle and big song-and-dance numbers.

"There have been directors that have tried simply copying the formula of Bollywood, but that hasn't worked," said Nadeem Paracha, a cultural commentator at Dawn newspaper. "Pakistanis expect something different, something that has their own flavour.

"If they can come up with that perfect formula, then I think there will be people going out and watching these movies."

A huge help is the rapidly declining cost of technology: film-makers now routinely make stunning-looking films with the same high-grade digital cameras used on films such as Prometheus and The Hobbit.

Jami believes Pakistani directors should focus on strong stories rather than trying to compete with India's "masala" style of film making.

His latest, Morqaye, is ostensibly a drama about a family pulled apart by circumstances, although he argues that the real subject matter is corruption, one of the big problems besetting Pakistan.

"I'm not trying to show the negative side; I'm trying to show the people who are fighting back," he said.

A notable recent hit was Bol, an elaborate social drama released in 2011 about a highly religious father who murders his only son, a member of Pakistan's transgender community. "Bol was the first Pakistani film to do $1m in business at the box office," said Mandviwalla, who believes the country is reaching a point where there are so many modern screens – which charge significantly more than the run-down, old cinemas – that Pakistani films can be profitable.

"I've started investing money in producing films because finally the market has increased to an extent where homegrown productions have become feasible."

With barely half a dozen films made each year, Mandviwalla said it would take time for Pakistan's young film-makers to raise their game.

Director Shahzad Nawaz warned that people should not get carried away.

"To truly say we have an industry we need a new film opening every week before we can claim there is a true renaissance," he said.

"This is a great new experiment, but it is going to take time."

• This article was amended on 1 June 2013. In the third paragraph it originally referred to the director as Jamshed Mahmood. He is known in the industry as Jami. This has been corrected.